Colonization

a: control by one power over a dependent area or people. b: a policy advocating or based on such control (Merriam-Webster)

A forced dependency. An entering, a hollowing, and a manufactured need. So as to become the new source of resources and meaning.

A disease, a dis-ease of culture.

What’s yours is mine and mine is mine. I must absorb what is yours for it to have value.

That what you once held dear, now decorates my (white) life. Colonization is key in the claim that whiteness has no culture and that all culture lies within the “other”. That we willfully or naïvely enter. Seeking pleasure, connection, beauty even identity. Our own identities invisible. We must claim anew.

Colonization destroys us both. A small pox of culture. Killing us and you. Some arrive on your shores with business plans and mini malls, to “improve” the neighborhood. While others desperately try to scrub our white past away with black soap. Rachel Dolezal-ing our lives. Yearning for something not us, but ours.

Saying you are not enough; I am not enough. But I will own it all. The price tag of belonging.

In colonization’s commodification, we claim culture can be static. Well, the “OTHER” is. Walling it off in a tomb of culture. The real indigenous are those of the past. The ancient past when everything was utopia, before white people. Static utopia’s to be bought and sold like trading cards. No different than souvenir lynching postcards. The commodity that colonization craves, a world without us.

That our culture can feel so void of us. That whiteness predicates an erasure of ourselves. Decorated with trophy’s of you. A voyeur to someone else’s life. Yet dripping with us. Every institution, building, road, school, home, slathered in us.

Footprints of salt water traced through your home, leaching the moisture from what was. Dehydrating. Preserving. For the latest museum exhibit.